Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

“Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”

“Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr. Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr. Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.

“Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going traveling with my… friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”

“Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”

Helena looks at Mr. Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Chan.”

“No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologizing for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”

Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.

“Yeah, I’m glad, too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon…”

“Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”

Despite repeatedly declining Mr. Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.

“Oh, did you see the news?” Mr. Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”

Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.

“—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”

“Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”

All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly printed steaks.

While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.

Suzanne Palmer began her career in painting and sculptures, long before she made the jump to writing. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Asimov’s , Analog , and Clarkesworld , among other places, and her first novel, Finder , was released this past April.

“The Secret Life of Bots” is as advertised in the title. It was also the 2018 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette and received the 2018 Washington Science Fiction Association Award for Small Press Short Fiction.

I HAVE BEEN activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.

“I serve,” the bot announced to the ship.

“I am assigning you task nine hundred forty-four in the maintenance queue,” Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”

“Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.

There was an Incidental on board. The bot would rather have been fixing something more exciting, more prominently complex, than to be assigned pest control, but the bot existed to serve and so it would.

Captain Baraye winced as Commander Lopez, her second-in-command, slammed his fists down on the helm console in front of him. “How much more is going to break on this piece of shit ship?!” Lopez exclaimed.

“Eventually, all of it,” Baraye answered, with more patience than she felt. “We just have to get that far. Ship?”

The Ship spoke up. “We have adequate engine and life support to proceed. I have deployed all functioning maintenance bots. The bots are addressing critical issues first, then I will reprioritize from there.”

“It’s not just damage from a decade in a junkyard,” Commander Lopez said. “I swear something scuttled over one of my boots as we were launching. Something unpleasant.”

“I incurred a biological infestation during my time in storage,” the Ship said. Baraye wondered if the slight emphasis on the word storage was her imagination. “I was able to resolve most of the problem with judicious venting of spaces to vacuum before the crew boarded, and have assigned a multifunction bot to excise the remaining.”

“Just one bot?”

“This bot is the oldest still in service,” the Ship said. “It is a task well-suited to it, and does not take another, newer bot out of the critical repair queue.”

“I thought those old multibots were unstable,” Chief Navigator Chen spoke up.

“Does it matter? We reach the jump point in a little over eleven hours,” Baraye said. “Whatever it takes to get us in shape to make the jump, do it, Ship. Just make sure this ‘infestation’ doesn’t get anywhere near the positron device, or we’re going to come apart a lot sooner than expected.”

“Yes, Captain,” the Ship said. “I will do my best.”

The bot considered the data attached to its task. There wasn’t much specific about the pest itself other than a list of detection locations and timestamps. The bot thought it likely there was only one, or that if there were multiples, they were moving together, as the reports had a linear, serial nature when mapped against the physical space of the Ship’s interior.

The pest also appeared to have a taste for the insulation on comm cables and other not normally edible parts of the ship.

The bot slotted itself into the shellfab unit beside its storage niche, and had it make a thicker, armored exterior. For tools it added a small electric prod, a grabber arm, and a cutting blade. Once it had encountered and taken the measure of the Incidental, if it was not immediately successful in nullifying it, it could visit another shellfab and adapt again.

Done, it recited the Mantra of Shapechanging to properly integrate the new hardware into its systems. Then it proceeded through the mechanical veins and arteries of the ship toward the most recent location logged, in a communications chase between decks thirty and thirty-one.